William Buckley, the American murdered in Beirut in 1985 after his kidnap and torture by Arab extremists, was identified in the U.S. media as a ``political attache'' or ``journalist.'' Basing his extraordinary investigative coup on interviews with scores of intelligence sources, including late CIA director William Casey, Thomas identifies Buckley as the CIA station chief in Beirut, an operative whose past operations included the surveillance of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. The author ( Voyage of the Damned ; Pontiff ) pulls back the curtain over the CIA's use of medical torture and other government operations around the world, from Angola to Israel. He describes how Buckley was injected with drugs, physically abused and mentally befuddled by mind-control expert Aziz al-Abub. This Arab doctor was but one of many disciples of Ewen Cameron, a respected Montreal psychiatrist at McGill University enlisted by CIA director Allen Dulles in the 1950s to devise techniques to scramble victims' minds irreversibly. In a well-documented dossier that reads like a thriller, Thomas spills details of various operations, among them the CIA's alleged bugging of the Vatican and the Pope. Film rights to Catalina Productions. (Apr.)